Memory issues with recently installed ubuntu

Question

Forgive my inexperience with Linux, but I've attempted to search for my issues but can't find answers.

This started when I saw that my PC doesn't give a dual-boot menu on start up and goes directly to Windows. I found that the answer was to install grub, but when I tried I got

grub-install: error: cannot open `/boot/grub/i386-pc/serial.mod': No space left on device.

I checked GParted and sda1 only has 100MB total space despite having a 500GB hard drive (which is designated as sda2), 60 of which is used. Is this the issue? I am also not able to download anything from online (every download fails). When I first started up I received a low memory warning, but have not been able to see that since. I don't know how much of this is connected but I'm getting the feeling I screwed something up with the installation.

df -h gives

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

udev 3.8G 0 3.9G 0% /dev

tmpfs 796M 9.5M 787M 1% /run

/dev/sdb1 15G 2.9G

/dev/loop1 1.4G 1.4G

/cow 81M 77M

I also just received a notification: "This computer has only 204.8kB disk space remaining"

Answer 1

Your issue is that your computer files are currently mounted on /sda1 which is only 100GB, whereas SDA2 seems to be an empty junk drive at the moment. To fix this, do the following, but read every step before trying anything.

The format for fstab, which is the partitioning and mounting file is as follows:

UUID=????????   /home    ext3          defaults       0       2

So you will need the following to fix this:

• UUID of your drive, which can be found with sudo blkid

• The directory to your /home folder (or where most of your files are being stored)

• What kind of file system you want, I recommend (ext3 or ext4: See here for difference(s))

• The last 2 tags are always going to be 0 and 2 unless you are experienced in Ubuntu enough to know what they do

Now that you have this information, run the following command as root:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

I use gedit, but any text editor will work.

Once there, at the bottom of the file you will see a line like this:

UUID=00000000  /   ext4          defaults       0       2

The UUID may be different, and depending on how you formatted your computer, some others may be, but what is important is that you remount (the folder/directory with most files in it) onto the 500GB /sda2. You can do this by adding the following to the bottom

/sda2          /     ext(3 or 4)       defaults        0          2

Then save, exit, and reboot!